I was quite pleased with Canada Reads program this year. Canada Reads is CBC’s reality radio program where five Canadian “celebrities” duke it out over whose choice of literature should be read by all Canadians. I’ve read four out of five books and they were all excellent. I started reading the fifth and, since it is a collection of short stories. I’ve read one and a half stories out of this one, but it was after I knew that the book was the first to be voted off, and, as it didn’t captivate me, I didn’t care for it too much.

With the four books that I’ve read and enjoyed I would have been happy to see any of them win. “Not Wanted on the Voyage” is the most literary of the lot. It poses many challenging questions while still maintaining both drama and humor. One of the panelists described it as unrelenting. My thoughts were that it was going to win because it is, from a snooty lit-crit point of view, the best. I was laughing out loud on the bus reading “King Leary”. The voice of the narrator is just so alive. “Brown Girl in the Ring” has the most imagination. I loved the post-semi-apocalyptic Toronto, I am actually looking forward to going to TO downtown next time I am there on business. “Icefields” has a calm feel to it and appropriately so since one of the main actors is a glacier.

The panelist were diverse as usual, an actor, a hip-hop/spoken word artist, a musician, a novelist and an astronaut. We correctly predicted that “King Leary” and “Not Wanted on the Voyage” will be the last two books left in the competition. It seriously looked like “Not Wanted” will win, but the astronaut, who had been voting against “King Leary” the whole week, had had a change of heart. The argument that changed his mind was that Tim Findley will be read whether or not his novel wins the competition, but “King Leary” has gone out of print soon after it came out and it was only re-printed now because of the Canada Reads program. Though it is not as complex a work as “Not Wanted on the Voyage”, it is an excellent read and, now that it received proper attention, it can be enjoyed by many readers that would not have stumbled across it otherwise.